The Obama administration is opening up a vast area of the Atlantic Ocean to oil and gas drilling while so much is being produced in the United States that the industry can’t find places to store it, and gasoline is at the lowest price in years. Meanwhile, communities along the Gulf of Mexico are still feeling the impact from the massive 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Drilling is being advanced, notwithstanding that solar and wind energy are ever more economical, without the climate-disrupting effects of petroleum consumption. Also, extracting oil from off-shore wells is ten times more expensive than on land and the Atlantic is a particularly treacherous place for drilling.
Further, the administration’s plan to lease stretches of the Atlantic off Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia to the oil industry sends a distinct signal to us further up the coast: we can easily be next. The oil industry has for decades coveted the waters off the coastlines of New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts (including the rich fishing grounds of Georges Bank). That’s only been stopped—and heretofore in the Atlantic to the south—by congressional moratoria. A continuation of these is doubtful with a Republican Congress dominated by anti-environmental members.
As a reporter for the daily Long Island Press, I broke the story in 1970 of the oil industry seeking to drill in the offshore Atlantic—and received a lesson in oil industry honesty (an oxymoron). I got a tip from a fisherman in Montauk, on the eastern tip of Long Island, who said he had seen the same sort of vessel as the boats he observed searching for oil when he was a shrimper in the Gulf of Mexico.
I spent the day telephoning oil companies. PR people for each said their companies were not involved in searching for oil in the Atlantic. But at day’s end, as I was walking out of the office, there was a call from a PR guy at Gulf saying, yes, Gulf was involved in exploring for oil in the Atlantic—and had been working in a “consortium” of 32 oil companies doing it. These included the companies that all day issued denials.
I traveled on the issue, including a 1971 visit to the first drilling rig set up in the Atlantic, off Nova Scotia. A rescue boat went round and round as the executive from Shell Canada explained: “We treat every foot of hole as a potential disaster.” An oil well blowout, a gusher, is one thing on land and another entirely on water. The Shell Canada man acknowledged that curtains, booms and other devices that the oil industry claims clean up spills “just don’t work in over five-foot seas.”
My research showed spills are frequent in offshore drilling. And as for drilling in the Atlantic, it’s been considered especially risky. As the President’s Council on Environmental Quality stated in one report, the Atlantic is a “hostile environment for oil and gas operations. Storm and seismic conditions may be more severe than in the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico.” A major spill along the Atlantic coast “could devastate the areas affected.”
Writing in the New York Times in February, former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley (now seeking the Democratic nomination for president) called the Obama’s administration move “a big mistake.” The “BP Deepwater Horizon disaster should remind us that the benefits of drilling do not outweigh the threat to local economies, public health and the environment when an inevitable spill occurs,” he wrote.
He noted how the oil spill “devastated the Gulf of Mexico region—most likely costing $100 billion in lost economic activity and restoration expenses, disrupting or destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs and causing long-term damage to 1,000 miles of fragile wetlands and beaches.” And “experts estimate that only 5 per cent of the 4.2 million barrels of oil spilled in the gulf was removed during the cleanup; even today oil from the spill is still appearing.”
“There is simply no compelling economic or security reason to expose the communities of the Atlantic Coast to the threats offshore drilling presents,” declared Mr. O’Malley “Moreover, offshore drilling fails to promote what must be our country’s foremost energy policy objective—achieving long-term energy security, creating sustainable jobs, supporting the development of new energy technologies and fighting climate change.”
The U.S. is now awash in petroleum. There’s so much that the Associated Press began a story on the issue in March with: “The United States has so much crude that it is running out of places to put it.” The article went on about how the “extra crude is flowing into storage tanks…pushing U.S. supplies to their highest point in at least 80 years.”
The alternative is clear. An extensive report recently funded by the National Bank of Abu Dhabi, deep in Middle East oil country, by the University of Cambridge of the U.K. and PricewaterhouseCoopers, states: “The energy system of the past will not be the same as the energy system of the future. It is clear that renewables will be an established and significant part of the future energy mix, in the region and globally.”
Solar photovoltaic power and wind energy have “already a track record of successful deployment,” said the report, “Financing the Future of Energy.” It detailed the dramatic reductions in the cost of solar and wind energy—solar photovoltaic falling by 80 per cent in six years and wind power by 40 per cent. It cited the planned construction of a 200 megawatt solar photovoltaic facility in Dubai setting “a new world benchmark”—it’s to be “competitive” with oil at $10 a barrel. Oil is now at $60 a barrel. There have been many studies mirroring this analysis.
We should leave what’s in the Atlantic for future centuries for medicine or, perhaps, an unforeseen need for plastics made with petroleum, and not extract it at enormous risk and with no good reason gobble it up now.
Journalist and Sierran Karl Grossman is a member of the Long Island Group and professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury. He is the author of six books and his investigative reporting appears regularly online at CounterPunch, the Huffington Post and other sites. For nearly 25 years, he has hosted a nationally-aired TV program, Enviro Close-Up.